Seoul International Competition, 2nd place / Banpo Hangang Connection Park and Cultural Facilities

Design: Ji Otterson Studio + BCHO Architects

Climate Engineering: Transsolar (with Climateflux) 

Landscape: HEA

Structure/Civil: WhitbyWoodMills

Images 1-3: Playtime Barcelona

Image rights: Ji Otterson Studio + BCHO Architects

The Inclusive Passage Museum Park aims to break down the existing rigid urban boundaries and serve as a social and cultural corridor by connecting various public programs that invite people of all backgrounds to participate.  

Integrating Urban and Natural Landscapes: The Han River, a vital part of South Korea's cultural heritage, represents a dynamic public space in Seoul where diverse social differences—including politics, income, education, gender, and religion—come together, promoting unity and shared experiences. Our Inclusive Passage Museum and Park acts as a sanctuary that remains welcoming and accessible in all weather conditions—rain or shine, hot or cold.

As residents of Seoul, our team is enthusiastic about the initial steps to transform the Olympicway, aiming to enhance urban connectivity to the Han River. This endeavor not only provides additional social spaces within the city but also extends a warm invitation to all who visit Seoul. The design of the Inclusive Passage strives to harmonize with the Han River rather than standing out as a prominent landmark. It seamlessly integrates the river's natural flow into its layout, emphasizing an organic experience for visitors. Positioned above the Olympic Expressway, the park offers a quiet retreat from traffic noise, enriched by strategic placements of shade-providing trees and other greenery, ensuring comfort and tranquility.

Starting from Sinbanpo-ro, the public pathway runs through the museum's interior and connects programs such as exhibition halls, community cafes, rooftop parks, stage plazas, and Han River Park. The existing urban structure, which was strictly separated by function and user, is woven into one organic pathway, allowing various functions to coexist dynamically. 

Rather than separating the museum from the park, the connecting path to the park itself becomes the main experience. The ramp, which connects to the park, is a device that citizens can access, pass through, and become participants in their daily lives, breaking away from the traditional character of museums as a place for the few and emphasizing publicness above all else. The museum's program will not be limited to exhibitions, but will accommodate various lecture programs for the public, an art book reading area, and an art loan program.

The pathway leading to the upper park offers a variety of programs, including a cooling plaza, sculpture garden, performance plaza, and terraced observation deck. It is connected to a café to make it easily accessible and inviting to the public.

Outdoor thermal comfort and passive design were central to our approach. We shaped the museum, park, and surrounding lightweight canopy structure to block winter winds, provide culturally-adapted shaded spaces, and create a safety barrier between visitors and the traffic below. This structure beautifully frames the Han River, making it the centerpiece of the visitor experience.

Sustainability and climate resilience are important design goals for the project, which ultimately aims to achieve carbon neutrality through solar power generation and geothermal energy. The museum building is designed as a hybrid wood and reinforced concrete structure, while the upper park is supported by recyclable precast double-T reinforced concrete slabs and cast-in-place columns and beams for safety and durability. Materials were carefully selected to maximize environmental performance and durability.

The Inclusive Passage Museum Park is planned to serve as an example of Seoul's step toward creating accessible parks and eco-friendly urban experiences for all. The goal of the Borderless Exhibition Park is to harmonize the complexity of architecture with the human experience and the surrounding natural and local context.

Ji/Otterson Studio has been selected as the winner of the Seoul Biennale Award at the 2023 Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. We were invited by the City of Seoul and this year's curator, Byoung Soo Cho, to create a portion of an expansive master plan that reimagines the city 100 years into the future. Our aim is to reintegrate Seoul with its natural landscape under the theme of "Land Architecture, Land Urbanism."

The opening event took place on September 1st, 2023 at the Songhyeon Green Plaza near Gyeongbokgung, as well as the surrounding area of the Seoul Hall of Urbanism & Architecture.

100 Years On: Seoul in Thermodynamic Balance

Thermodynamics is the study of the relationships between heat and other forms of energy. Seoul, initially planned with consideration for its landscape, has undergone significant changes due to its shift from an agricultural to an industrial society and a knowledge-workforce paradigm. This transformation has led to massive thermodynamic shifts, including the burning of fossil fuels, resulting in atmospheric CO2 emissions and global warming. As a consequence, the use of machines for climate control increased, while the utilization of landscape and construction materials for the same purpose declined, turning nature into an aesthetic commodity. Looking ahead 100 years, Seoul aims to restore thermodynamic balance with its natural features, materials, and energy resources. To achieve this, a network of thermodynamic exchange between landscape, constructed material, and people will be established, surpassing the quality of life in current neighbourhoods. For the site in Ichon-dong, a series of interventions are proposed to restore thermodynamic balance over the next century. This includes restoring the river’s edge as a wetland, making the riverside accessible to the city’s entire length, and implementing green corridors and urban promenades to restore natural air conditioning and breeze cycles. Additionally, former concrete towers and slabs will be repurposed for heat exchange, and large thermal-battery structures will store heat for winter and release it during summer. Paved areas of the city will capture energy through thermo-electric and piezo-electric technologies, while autonomous vehicles and delivery robots ensure a near-loss-less energy cycle. The new architectural language of the city will be arranged through materials according to their ability to store, release, or reflect heat, store carbon, or clean the air, rather than according to their ability to instill meaning through symbolism.

MORE INFO: 서울도시건축비엔날레(SBAU) (seoulbiennale.org)

The site in Seoul is characterized by the dual presence of a mountain stretching from the southwest to the southeast, defining the site as a valley. The new residential, commercial, and cultural complex derives its design from this natural quality, and from the spectacular solar and thermodynamic conditions that result from this geography. The site is divided in an arc by a sunken road that connects at two ends to a junction road, creating an inner space for commercial and cultural gathering, surrounding a central park around a public stream, which is oriented around the natural topography. The massing of buildings in the central zone are oriented to maximize natural light and passive heating in public spaces an inside the buildings themselves. The indigenous vegetation and water provide natural cooling of public spaces in the summer and reflect the beloved natural and cultural space of the “Gyegok” in Korea’s vast mountain ranges. Residential towers are built in the outer ring, with a floor layout which promotes natural cross ventilation and access to gardens placed along the building’s terraces and facades. Traffic circulation and parking are below grade, promoting a free and continuous landscape that blends with the natural scenery, and creates a safe atmosphere for all residents, workers, and visitors.

We are conducting research on passive solar residential typology in Seoul, South Korea on ways to create thermal mass for our mass timber interior module using materials such as concrete and stone floor toppings with varying reflectance and thermal inertia. Our aim is to achieve time-calibrated and seasonal comfort. Additionally, we are investigating water tube thermal storage due to its high thermal storage capacity and potential lack of embodied carbon.

In planning sustainable development, it is crucial to consider the comfort of outdoor spaces, which is often overlooked. Our proposal takes into account Seoul's humid continental climate and provides comfortable outdoor spaces for both hot humid summers and cold dry winters. This is achieved by considering wind patterns, solar access, and the reflectance and thermal storage properties of various materials to create seasonally appropriate outdoor spaces.

More information soon.

The new DJ Recreation Garden is an opportunity to unite the existing collection of sports facilities in Sports Complex while adding 2 new sports facilities. First, the master plan is united through the gesture of creating a “sports and health landscape” rather than a series of box facilities connected by roads. Working with existing site terrain, this sports landscape stretches from the soccer stadium, continuously across the site from the west to the east edge of the designated site, creating a shared plaza between the two facilities, and offering an uninterrupted pedestrian experience of wandering through the new landscape.

The buildings are united through a pergola structure that adjusts to reduce solar radiation in the central plaza during the summer, making it comfortable year-round. The pergola structure is a reference to traditional Korean architecture, where the dominant elements of ground and roof plane offer shelter, while framing the view out, in such a way as to establish an ambiguous relationship between inhabitant and landscape, interior and exterior.

The landscape is infused with gardens and pavilions that are calibrated to human physiology, by offering a heterogeneous sensory experience. Various gardens and pavilions heat, cool, and dehumidify spaces through natural means to provide a thermally and visually heterogeneous landscape that offers appropriate outdoor exercise and relaxation for each season, and for each type of health activity that the users may discover.

The project began as a reflection on a primitive shelter, and a speculative design challenging the modern idea of “building envelope” as it relates to comfort. The modern building envelope separates “here” from “there” as two thermal conditions, one natural and one artificial. If architecture is mainly the manipulation of climate, then we can say that since modernism, architecture has been squashed to fit into about 30cm of thickness. If we question this notion of “stable” comfort, as an opposition to a natural climate, we can read “in” and “out” as a continuum that allows for nomadic occupation, and even the manipulation of thermal comfort through material properties or cultural aspects like food.

The simplest form of shelter is a topographical condition with a plane overhead to project its inhabitants from the elements. While contemporary homes reflect entirely artificial climatic conditions on the interior produced by machines, the Thermal Topography House creates a topographical interior, where floor elements, like geological conditions, vary in thickness, elevation, and in their ability to reflect, absorb, and emit the sun’s energy.

The project is also rooted in the wide thermal spectrum of experience when dining in South Korea. Certain foods, like Naegmyeon are served cold, sometimes with ice bringing the temperature right down to 0C, while sides dishes are served near room temperature, grilled foods are cooked to an internal temperature of 62 to 68C, and the hottest foods are served boiling, right in front of you. You might in Korea, as we would in the west, eat the hottest, spiciest foods on the coldest day to warm your body. But in Korea you might have the experience of shivering from the AC while eating noodles on ice, and you might have the experience of sweating on a summer day in front of boiling soup.

The dishes also have characteristic serving styles: cold noodles are often served in brass bowls, small side dishes are served cool or room temperature and may be served commonly on plastic for economy, and hot soup is often served in a clay pot. The materials themselves lend to this experience - the conductivity of the brass allows you to sense the temperature as heat moves quickly from your hand into the metal, and the clay pot, for example, is used for its thermal inertia.

The winter garden protruding on the South is a passive solar generator, with a low albedo concrete floor and wall to store energy. The interior topography steps down in this room to receive more sunlight and to help induce convective movement. The adjacent 2nd living spaces has a brighter, high-albedo flooring, that reflects solar energy to stay cooler.

Fabric shades on the roof seasonally control the amount of solar energy that comes into contact with various living spaces, and photo-voltaic roof tiles power water heaters in the north side of the house, and supply additional heat to the bedrooms and living spaces in winter.

Since 1753, The illustration and descriptions in Marc Antione Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture have captured the imagination of architects and architectural theorists, some of whom noted the forced depiction of Classical architectural form in Charles Eaisen’s famous frontispiece illustration. What Laugier’s essay actually described was a construction where each element was borne of a necessity to shelter man from natural elements.

Historically, walls controlled climatic factors through a single monolithic layer of earth, or stone. Today, a multitude of barriers control air, vapor, heat, liquid, acoustics, and other factors. While the building envelope has become more advanced and complex in this layering, contemporary architecture has treated the poche of a wall section as abstract matter. The project is a modern construction of this “primitive hut” for the current era of “building science”.

The primitive hut on an island in the Stockholm Archipelago is a small recreational construction for a summer home. The hut seeks to create heterogeneous thermal and acoustic conditions through the strategic layering, bending and choice of materials in this “sandwich”, such that it is no longer abstract - the unseen ordering of materials plays an active role in the ordering of space.

More images coming soon.

Iceland / August 2016 / Competition / Iceland Trekking Cabins Competition / Team: Yewon Ji, Ryan Otterson, Nicolas Lee

The project starts from the understanding that the primary function of eco-tourism in Iceland is the visual consumption of the landscape. The perpetual documentation of the landscape in popular media (ex. Instagram) and increases in tourism of recent years have made the world increasingly aware of Iceland’s natural assets, without acknowledging their sensitivities to tourism, industry, and climate change. The cabin is a reaction to the damage rendered by tourists in the landscape, conceived as a self-sustaining machine for consumption of the dramatic view in real time. Amenities and their systems are self-contained in the building, allowing the building to sit functionally autonomous in its various sites.

The proposed trekking cabin sits lightly on the landscape, on thin 40mm helical piles driven into the earth. Visitors ascend the stair into a structure divided in 2 zones:

I) The service zone: sleeping rooms, restrooms, a kitchen, storage areas and mechanical areas produce energy and clean water to sustain occupants without the necessity of creating a footprint. The service areas are clad in light colored wood, and the exterior appears a minimal dwelling structure, with openings appearing only where functionally necessary, and a dark steel entry stair suspended just above the ground.

II) The dark zone facilitates the singular function of viewing. Blackout curtains may be drawn around like a theater, where the glass wall becomes the interface to the landscape outside. The glass wall is reflective on the dark exterior, refocusing its appearance back onto the landscape itself and denying its visual and physical impact.

Helsinki, FI / March 2015 / Competition

Competition / Team:  Ryan Otterson, Nicolas Lee

Project was selected for the Jury's List in the Next Helsinki competition in April 2015 and will be published in 2016.

As the largest passenger terminal in Finland, Helsinki sees 5.4 million passengers every year. The daily influx of large ships has produced a harbor-side condition that is separated from the city center of Helsinki by the large non-descript terminals that populate its edges. Urban life has been detached from the water’s edge of South Harbor.

The unique maritime culture and landscape of the archipelago provides a unique condition in which travel and connection between islands is common. We propose to de-clutter the harbor’s edge by removing the existing cruise terminals, and replacing them with a new terminal in the center of the harbor. By relocating the cruise terminals, the harborfront can be freed up and returned to the city. 
Furthermore, the proposed cruise terminal would be a part of a larger facility housing a center of arts and culture. The Terminal of Arts and Culture is conceived as a microcosm of Helsinki’s urban activity and Finnish Culture. The distinct qualities and character of the city is celebrated and displayed as a piece of collective art. The activity of ferry travel becomes a spectacle rather than a nuisance to the water’s edge.

With the cruise terminals relocated, the harborfront is freed up to become a continuous landscape, public space and development hosting a wide array of activities. The different program along the harborfront responds to the urban context: The West Promenade Park is an extension of the Observatory Hill (Tähtitorninvuoren puisto), The Harbor Bath utilizes the existing piers to create outdoor pools of different sizes, The Market Square (Kauppatori) is a multifunctional outdoor space that extends out to the waterfront and The East Promenade is a landscape that houses the Finnair SkyWheel, as well as new urban development containing residential and office program. Water taxi stations are spread throughout the harborfront providing direct access to and from the Terminal.

Chicago, IL / September 2015 / Competition / ChiDesign Competition as part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial/ Team: Yewon Ji, Ryan Otterson, Nicolas Lee; Formerly known as Atelier 2B

Project was selected as a Winner of the ChiDesign Center for Architecture, Design and Education competition organized by the Chicago Architecture Foundation in October 2015. The competition jury featured Stanley Tigerman, David Adjaye, Monica Ponce de Leon, Billie Tsien and Ned Cramer. The project was exhibited at the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2015, and was on display until January 2016.

Chicago has long been known as the birthplace of the skyscraper. Since his arrival in Chicago in 1937, Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe became the leading figure in the Second Chicago School, the City which would become his architectural playground. The clarity and ethos of his work harmonized with the city’s architectural past and trajectory. For Mies, “Less is More” suggested less about minimalism than it did about the architectural legibility of his projects. The repetitive, and to some, mundane qualities of his work bring its platonic aspects to life; the plane of the city (the plinth), the dissolution of footprint (the glass lobby), and vertical movement (consolidated core as a centerpiece).

As contemporary space and the public realm become increasingly fluid, we propose the radical re-arrangement of these elements that have so defined the figure-ground of Chicago’s downtown. We propose the typical hard, consolidated core to be replaced with a soft one: an extension of the plinth where the core no longer resists the continuous plane of the city, but rather inhales public activity, bringing a new life to Mies dissolved public boundary which before only appeared in plan. The Marble clad cores that defined Mies’ iconic works defined weak sectional relationships between floors. The Collaborative core is the logical extension of Mies’ “universal space” which was never fully resolved in his towers or in his beloved playground (Chicago).

more information soon.

Bologna, IT / May 2015 / Competition / YAC Young Architects Competitions (Food and Wellness Center) / Team: Yewon Ji, Ryan Otterson, Nicolas Lee; Formerly known as Atelier 2B

This Project was selected as a Finalist in July 2015.


Eight Pavilions For The Senses: A Center for Body Restoration is organized around the notion of retreat. The building is an architectural expression of bodily disconnection from everyday life, and from our typical modes of sensory experience. A new colonnade outlines the site and echoes the famous porticos of Bologna and signifies the act of stepping out of the civic experience, into an intimate encounter with one’s own senses. Between the new colonnade and the existing structure is a lush garden, a densified wilderness that perceptually separates the inner realm of retreat from the civic realm on the other side. As one enters the brick preparation building, showers, lockers, a shop, and staff facilities prepare the visitor for his routine. Exiting this facility to the former warehouse, the visitor encounters a collection of platonic objects gathered around the “soak”, a pool that serves as the datum that ties the experiences together and as a cleanse between sensory experiences. The pavilions gathered around the pool and in the lush garden reconnect the user with specific sensory extremes and strange juxtapositions rather than programmatic simplicities. The lush garden cleanses the user’s palate as one proceeds from one pavilion to another, heightening senses through contrast.